Feet on the Ground, Head in the Clouds

Commerce has a timing problem. The business landscape today is all over the place when it comes to commerce. Some organizations are operating off of old information, seeking solutions that are out of touch with today’s business landscape. Other companies have their head in the clouds and are thinking so far into the future that they aren’t executing for today’s business environment. As TJ told me, “Continue to educate yourself on what may be off in the distant future but make sure that doesn’t distract you from practical, everyday improvements that can be made in your business today.” The dilemma is what do we take from the way business has always been done, and what to we adopt from where business is going. Many organizations find themselves trying to modernize and integrate only to be behind again by the time the latest integration is done. Digital transformation requires a change in thought in how we do business, what technology is available, what the marketplace is like now, and what it might be like around the corner. By the time you add culture and talent issues in the mix, you find business agility is the ultimate transformation needed.

Can I outsource this? When people look to outside help, they often come with poor education on what is needed and even worse, they may not be able to know if the person they are hiring is making the right strategic choices for their organization. Nobody is immune to disruption and change. Who has the answers? When I asked TJ what the biggest problem is with customers and the industry he said, “Education, most organizations don’t know what they need, or worse they think they need one thing when it may not be the right solution for them.” Outdated thinking can have people hiring organizations to solve the wrong problems. The danger of insourcing is you may not know what you don’t know and then you will be behind the market. If an organization looks for external service providers and consultants, both the organization and the service provider have to be up to date to find a mutual solution.

The Wild West of Commerce

Pioneers had it rough, we are all pioneers now. TJ told me about a presentation he did comparing commerce and technology adoption to the wild west. He said, “If a pioneer showed up too early there was no support, it was dangerous, but there was a lot of opportunity. If they showed up too late, there was more competition, less opportunity, but more safety.” Finding the right timing is key to success and maximum returns. Operating with yesterday’s business practices and technology feels safe because we are familiar with it, but the returns on old models and thinking are shrinking.

TJ’s advice for businesses looking to integrate new technology is, “Early adopters have the costs of building the infrastructure that the industry is built on. They face challenges and find ways to overcome them. You want to time your move into a market as soon as the infrastructure lowers the risk to a level that is acceptable for your business.” Digital transformation and upgrading your commerce systems can be exciting but risky if you don’t find the right solutions and experts to help you. The world of commerce isn’t going to get more civilized, if anything it is getting more disruptive and wild as new technologies constantly change, you can no longer focus on making the right choice, you have to be able to constantly be making the right choices for your business and customers.

Less Transactional, More Relational

Experience-driven commerce is the present and future. The days of putting products on a shelf and a sign out are dwindling. Customers and society have changed and will continue to evolve in this dance with technology. The experiences, memories, and everything that touches a customer from end-to-end and beyond are now the measuring stick of revenue, not the sale. Transactions are temporary, relationships are lasting. The push for frictionless brand experiences will come to a peak and then when interfaces are smooth, shipping is fast, and everything functions as you want it, what is left is experience. In a world of increasing competition, products become less relevant, experiences actually become the product. In this experience as a product environment, touchpoints become micro-experiences, and those end-to-end experiences become memories, not purchases. TJ’s advice is, “Constantly be evaluating your customer’s journey and looking for ways to make that touch point a better experience for them. Use whatever tools are currently at your disposal and don’t spend too much time worrying about what might be next. If you understand where and how your customer interactions need to be improved, the tooling will be obvious.”

Thriving in the Now

Your perfection has an expiration date. Abandon the idea that implementing the right software or technology will save you from disruption and change. What works today will be old around the corner. Even the futuristic technology will be old shortly. Instead of trying to be on the cutting edge, you have to learn to live on the cutting edge in practical, incremental, and holistically organizational ways. TJ nails it with this, “A merchant needs to be educated about the market and the latest trends. Those things help you have an understanding of the bigger picture so you know when it’s time to make moves in your market. However, don’t spend too much time in the future and neglect executing in the now. There are countless things that can be done to make incremental improvements in your business.  Every minute you spend thinking about something that’s too far off in the future and may never happen is a minute that one of your competitors can leverage to either gain ground or surpass you by executing on constant improvement now.”

Over time your organization will develop so you can deal with more change. You need agile educated and learning organizations that can partner with the same when it comes to technology providers and experts. Organizations used to focus on learning from the past to ensure longevity. To thrive in today’s modern commerce environment you have to understand what is happening today, see what is coming, and execute against the near future today and every day. If you can find peace in the storm, drown in the now, then you will ride the wave of disruptive commerce wherever it may take us.

I want to give a huge thanks to TJ Gamble, a true expert in commerce for the fantastic conversation and contribution to this post. If you aren’t following him, you really should and check out his Youtube channel.

What are your thoughts? What do you think commerce will look like in the next 5 years? What is driving most of the change in commerce? Who will be the winners and losers in modern commerce? Leave your thoughts below and share this post if you found it useful. Thanks for reading.

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When we think of digital transformation we often think of IT deployments across large organizations, but it is the digital transformation of society that is really creating change. I recently got to talk with my good friend, analyst, and fellow futurist Brian Solis about his latest book LifeScale (Available on Amazon now) and the story behind the book was really compelling. He told me how he set out to write a follow up to his book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design. He found himself distracted, uninspired and overwhelmed by everything. He decided to deep dive and find out why he and many others had gotten to this point at this point in history. What he ended up doing was writing a book that not only solved the problem he was having, but it also applies to customers, employees, and organizations small and large. When I looked at the principles of his book I quickly saw the connection to all the stakeholders. Let’s look at the core relationships between digital transformation, society, and how we must adapt to thrive in the future.

The Dance of Society and Business

With hands clasps tightly to each other, society and business are dancing into the future. Technology isn’t changing the world, the integration of technology and society is. The way we communicate, work, play, and life is being changed by technology constantly and society is driving the change. Consumer adoption is the deciding factor on whether a technology is embraced or ignored. As much as we want to think new is better, the fact is the consumer is finally changing decisions in boardrooms. The days of serving up an offering in an uncompetitive marketplace where customers will flock to your offering because there is nothing else exciting going on, those are gone. One of the worst things that can happen to your brand today is to be ignored. The customer is the kingmaker and digital transformation is a necessity for keeping up with consumer interest.

Who Shall Lead

The chicken is the egg. The old question, what came first the chicken or the egg has boggled minds for a long time. The higher thought is that they are one in the same. The connection is unbreakable. In the same way, society determines the winners and losers of technology, yet the offerings can affect the direction. Digital transformation is not an internal process, because business no longer operates disconnected from the customer. There are no eggs without chickens and no chickens without eggs. This realization is what is happening with CX and digital transformation. There are no more departments like IT, marketing, management, they are all becoming one organization. This organization is no longer independent from the consumers, they are one business relationship. Design, management, and marketing must all be driven by customers and shareholders without customer revenues won’t survive. The C-suite may not know it fully yet, but the customers will lead the future of business. For a deeper probe into the Chicken/egg debate see Ryan’s video below which should illustrate the convoluted thinking behind digital transformation today which is further complicated by technology being both the problem and the answer.

Technology is the Problem and the Answer

The future is coming fast. Technology is creating disruption in society, yet it is also the solution to managing change. The more change is caused by new technology, the more we need it to help us find what is relevant (search, AI assistants, content, social networks), ignore what is not (adblockers, DVR, personalizaiton). In Brian’s book LifeScale, he talks about the impact that distraction is having on us as individuals. This also applies to employees (lack of inspiration, engagement, and retention), customers (harder to get and hold attention to market, less brand loyalty, information overload). Adam Morgan, creative director for Adobe, talked with a group of 60 influencers from around the world that I was a part of at Adobe Summit. He talked about how organizations were chasing short attention spans by attempting 6 second ads. There comes a point where giving the consumer what they want accelerates the deterioration of the experience for everyone. What he realized was emotions and substance mattered more than format. As technology creates disconnect, people will want more human connection. It isn’t one or the other because technology can also help us connect.

Creating Connection

What kills most digital transformation is not technology, it’s culture. The human element is more important than ever. Technology can facilitate wonderful new possibilities but organizations are made up of people and marketplaces are made up of people. If you can’t connect the people and the technology, digital transformation will not succeed.  Oh, and don’t forget that the point of digital transformation is to connect with customers. Even from design, planning, and strategy, the end result will be measured by proper connection of product or service with the consumer. Targeting, market fit, and market penetration are all about proper connection. The way we communicate, social media, mobile, omni-channel, and even chatbots and AI are all technology-driven connections. You can’t succeed without connection and customer experience lives or dies on connecting with customers. Digital transformation requires a connection between technology and employees. As Brian says.”We need to invest in motivation, learning, unlearning and also digital wellness to connect the dots between employee experience & customer experience!” I wrote about this recently about how employee experience can transform customer experience, you can see how it comes full circle.

Change is Chaos or a Ladder

Organizations are running scared, disruption, technology, and competition are creating a relentless marketplace. How can an organization find peace in the chaos… balance. Just as Brian had to find personal balance and wrote a book on the key principles and tactics to find balance in this changing world, so also do organizations from leadership to employees need to find the same personal balance which then leads to organizational balance, which leads to societal balance. Technology isn’t going to slow down, and it isn’t going to wait for anyone, but we can get in step with it and become agile and take the lead personally and organizationally.

This clip from Game of Thrones talks about “The Realm” but it really is the way many people think of their brands. Their brand becomes a story they tell themselves until they believe it even though it is not reality in their customers or the market’s eyes. They see change as chaos instead of seeing it as a ladder which simply requires one smart move after another to rise above the competition. Enjoy… House Stark!

The key factors in Brian’s new book LifeScale are:

Distraction, Purpose, Deep Work, Ritual, Expression, Focus, and Self-Esteem

Understanding how these impact you personally can help you get clarity and balance to thrive in an environment where everyone else is operating in fear, stress, and overwhelm. I appreciate the great conversations Brian and I have had and the great contribution he has given through his books, research, and content. Give him a follow if you aren’t already and thanks for reading our post.

Share your thoughts: What do you think the key factors impacting the evolution of business are? Where are organizations missing it? What is the big picture of business success look like? Love to hear your thoughts and please share the post if you found it valuable. Thanks

*Resources: Brian Solis’s new book: LifeScale. Brian’s last book: X: The Experience  When Business Meets Design. Adam Morgan’s Book: Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business: Proving the Value of Creative Ideas with Science.

*disclosure: links on my site to products are affiliate links and I can make a commission on purchases made by readers.

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Sound the alarms! Everyone is talking about customer experience and digital transformation.  For some, this is an exciting conversation and others it is coming from the panic of a changing business landscape. Whatever angle you or your organization is coming from you can’t deny the importance of customer experience. According to a Digital Marketing Trends report, customer experience is considered the most exciting business opportunity. Employees are watching the customer finally get their day, wondering if theirs is far behind. The fact is, the organizational focus is shifting all the time and the big question is how are all these different focused connected.

Well, I recently had an excellent conversation with Annette Franz a seasoned CX expert, founder of CX Journey, and Co-host of CXchat. One of the things she said was really interesting to her was the connection between employee experience and customer experience. Join us as we unpack the connection, dive into why it is essential to understand, and what is killing CX initiatives and how you can succeed.

The Ugliness of Patchwork

The problem with businesses is they won’t accept change. Brands of days past were built on who could build the biggest, most extensive and resource-rich brand to dominate the business environment. Businesses who did this thought it meant their brand would go on forever. Look out! Reality is about to slap you in the face. Size is a liability now, resources are not as valuable as they used to be, and longevity is no longer guaranteed. In response to the pressures to stay relevant organizations have had to rethink and relearn a more complex model of doing business from IT to marketing, to operations and innovation. Companies are still thinking a great campaign or software solution is going to save them. Somebody lean over and tell the CEO what year it is.

Your patch is unsightly. Technology won’t solve your problem when your organization from design forward is not focused on your customer. Imagine someone making a tear in the Mona Lisa and then putting a piece of tape over it to fix it. Many organizations are standing there with roles of duct tape in hand hoping to fix the organizational problems they are facing. Customer experience is only one outward facing part of the digital business equation. The outside gets a lot of focus because nobody wants to deal with the inside. In this case, we’re talking about employee experience.

An Engineering Failure

Finding the Bridge to Your Customers. So your organization has become aware that your customer is actually vital to your success, revenues, and future. Congratulations mom and pops businesses survived by understanding this one point. So as we said earlier a patch is not going to work. Business is moving at a velocity now that any business patch will get blown out as things accelerate. What organizations need now is to make sure every piece of their business is solid, connected, and agile. Holistic business health is essential for the coming times. This means starting within and looking at the other areas you have been devaluing…employees.

The future belongs to the talent. If you understand business and HR, you know that the way we work is changing and organizations need talented people to innovate, create, and survive in a more competitive business environment. Employee churn, generational mindsets concerning work, and technology are creating yet another hostile environment for attraction and retention of talent. As Annette says, “engaged employees are more productive, stay longer, and want to see the business succeed. They drive customer happiness and loyalty, and ultimately, they drive the customer experience.  Just like a bolt that fails on a bridge that then transfers the increased load onto the next bolt and so on until your whole bridge falls, customer experience starts deeper in an organization with the employees.

I wrote a piece about converting customer touchpoints into customer experiences. Many of these touchpoints are digital, but some of the only human touchpoints remain in front line employees and customer service reps. Even that is small thinking because the one thing that touches everything the customer does is the employees. From design to leadership, marketing to IT, employees impact what the customer experiences from marketing to product and service. Even though most organizations say one of their top priorities is customer experience, employee experience is nowhere close. This is an engineering failure. If you fail to improve employee experience, how can expect to deliver valuable experiences to your customers?

Follow the dominos. Poor employee experience leads to more churn. This leads to less experienced employees building products, delivering service, and impacting your customer. The lower employee tenure creates a less distinct company culture and more selfish political maneuvering. The new millennial workforce leans towards having a purpose and this magnifies the churn as the work is disconnected and relationships with co-workers / teams are broken from the churn. This all leads to reduced results from managers and leadership who are getting more pressure to deliver. We haven’t even folded in the problems that digital transformation and technology bring. This creates businesses that are like 100 cats in a bag. Now you have leadership and management feeling overwhelmed, selfish in positioning themselves for their exit more than building long-term success. Welcome to business in the digital world.

The Untouchables

Sorry, that is our policy. I cringe even saying those words in my mind but we have all been told that by a brand at some point in our lives. You are left powerless talking to a customer service rep who is powerless to help you. These untouchable policies, procedures, and business processes can kill customer experiences and leave people feeling like they can do nothing to stop them. Customers have a problem with a brand, they go through an automated system that doesn’t care, they reach an outsourced call center that doesn’t care who search through a database of answers based on policies that don’t care about the customer. Nobody cares until the entire brand risks going out of business then everyone cares.

Decriminalize customer service. One of the fundamental problems with customer service reps that has a compounding effect on CX is not enabling customer service to solve problems.  Customers call for solutions not someone checking a database for answers that tell the customer that there is no solution. This also makes the customer service rep take the backlash of a non-solution from the customer. The employee experience and customer experience are negative because they weren’t empowered to fix the solution whether it fits inside the company policy or not. Front-line employees should not have to be the bad guy when it comes to cx. There are countless organizational workflows, policies, and procedures that need to be looked at again in the lens of how they impact the employee’s experience and the customers.

Abundance Doesn’t Come From Taking

You are going to have to pre-pay. So what is the core problem in business today keeping organizations from succeeding. Businesses are takers. Employees can feel it, customers can feel it. When everyone from stockholders, to CEOs, managers, and marketing are focused on taking and not giving a brand will fail in this new reality. As Annette says, “Many companies still refuse to make the employee experience a priority, focusing instead on shareholder value, the bottom line, and/or the customer experience (first) without considering the implications of a poor employee experience on all of the above.” Givers are winners in the future of business. Customer focused means making decisions on what gives value to the customer. Leadership with an obsessive focus on customers will survive and last. Technology focused on delivering, not extracting customer value will win. Companies focused on giving to their employees will have employees who want to give back and to their customers. True affinity radiates like light. Brands want to be abundant and you can’t have abundance by taking, only by giving.

Play the long game. I have built a large and powerful personal network over the years. I know for a fact that it is because I give tremendous value everywhere I can. I don’t take and yet I receive. I always had a better vision for work, business, and relationships. I am blessed to be able to share my thoughts and hopefully inspire others to reach for the high bar. The long-game is so much more profitable than the short game. Customers are the long-game. Employees are the long-game, when you take care of both of them there will be plenty of money for the stockholders and leaders. As Annette says in a recent article on the long-game of CX, “Firms that run inconsistent CX programs that are measured independently of each other will greatly struggle to see improvements in business results.”

What are your thoughts? Can happy employees really make a difference to the bottom line? Are organizations going to figure this out the hard way or not at all? Can brands survive without taking care of their employees and customers? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and share this post if you find it valuable. Huge thanks to my friend Annette Franz with CX Journey, if you aren’t connected with her reach out. Thanks for reading.

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Business hasn’t just changed, it’s entered a constant state of change. This is something that has only happened in fragments before now. Periods of change in history have been marked by ages. These ages affect everyone in the environment both small and great. Some of these ages are known as golden ages and others dark. Marketing and business are going through transformational ages now and will continue to in the near future. Attention has also been going through a parallel set of ages. [Spoiler] we are past the golden age :[  I recently had an amazing conversation with David Armano from Edelman on this topic which started with the conversation on digital transformation.

The New World of Digital Transformation

“The major factor of digital transformation is the speed and scale that is requiring organizations big and small to adapt, change evolve at the speed of their digitally enabled customers.” – David Armano

Progress is Crushing. For many organizations digital transformation is a reaction to the realization that business and society has changed. It crept in with social media and smartphones and before you know it, the internet became essential. Once it was thoroughly adopted and went beyond novelty the world changed. Businesses treated it like finding a cute baby bear in the wilderness. The embraced it with no idea that the momma bear of disruption would tear many of them to pieces. The response as they watched numbers change and giants get disrupted was a digital panic for transformation.

Welcome to the Wild West. Little gunslinging startups were now serious threats to the established leaders and the dramatic need for business agility left large organizations with vast resources frozen or at risk that the brand wouldn’t survive change at the scale needed. Millennials who were then growing side hustles into real challenger brands and also coming into positions of power made the perfect storm. Now digitally native startups had an equal or greater chance at the throne and established brands realized they need to transform. It’s a new world out there. A digital first world. Stake your claim, everything is up for grabs.

The Golden Age of Customer Experience

Hey Customers, Now You Really Are Number One! As if the massive shifts in business workflows weren’t enough change, add in the return of the customer. Yes, brands have said that the customer is number one for decades but it was generally never true. Now that they are distracted and have many other choices, well bye bye revenue if you don’t focus on them. The buzz became customer experience. The smart businesses are already getting on board. Companies like Adobe, who I work with as both an influencer and as Head of Social for their partner program, have been focusing on customer experience end to end from design forward. Holistic design through marketing is key to making customers the center of your business universe. We are entering a golden age for customers.

Customer-Owned Businesses. Coming from a time when shareholders drove product and business decisions, digital transformation has enabled the customer to finally have a seat at the table. Customers, not shareholders are the real owners of the business, without them the business goes under. Brands are starting to realize this and focus on not just product, but customer experience management (CXM). This golden age of customer experience will run for an internet while. Yes, customers will bask in the rays of personalized and immersive experiences as this age matures. As all golden ages do, it will come to an end. What will cause the fall? What will the next age be?

Winter is Coming

The Ice Age of Attention Will Follow the Golden Age of Customer Experience. The white walkers are coming and you should be afraid. In Game of Thrones, the white walkers are basically supernatural beings who are forming an army that threatens everyone’s way of life. Futuristic consumers are the white walkers for brands. Imagine what marketing will look like when customers have such personalized experiences that any attempt to communicate with them or get their attention will be ignored. Immersive personalization will create the ultimate ad blocker, one that resides in the mind of the consumer and it can’t be disabled. Open marketplaces will shrink, splinter, and disappear.

If It Isn’t My Squirrel, I Won’t Be Distracted. As the bar is raised for attention and the expectations are raised, brands will have to hire or become immersive media companies to design immersive personalized real-time experiences. As David says, “Winter will come when experiences feel efficient but not memorable, predictable but not exceptional. The bar is being raised every day.” The idea of attention-grabbing general broadcast marketing will dissipate. This will further come to fruition with the broad adoption of spatial computing and augmented reality as the new interface for information. Sorry smartphones people will no longer look at a little screen for their information or even imagine why they would have done that once they experience the unboxed internet. Integration, immersion, personalization…. does that sound like an open marketplace for attention? I don’t think so either. The byproduct of all the customer experience design and personalization will be the shrinkage of open attention marketplaces (squirrel marketing). The experiences we have will be better, but consumers will be deeper in experience ecosystems and every brand on the outside will not exist. What will be the new new then?

The Rise of Experience Loyalty

The World Does Revolve Around Me. Customer loyalty is still talked about but many brands have decided attention and action are easier to attain than loyalty. I mean who can keep up with the digital transformation of the whole world. In my last post, I talked about turning touchpoints into micro-experiences. This is the short term goal of the near future, but as that evolves deeper personalized experiences will be the norm. Imagine watching a movie tailored to your interests and created in real time by AI with product placement tailored to your aspirations and inclinations. I know that may seem far-fetched now, but trust me it isn’t that far away.  Recently there was a study on attention maxing out in the gaming world. Fortnite is a major player in the gaming attention economy and another article talked about how Fortnite is like a social platform centered around shared experiences. The gaming industry isn’t growing by leaps and bounds for nothing. They are accidentally creating personalized social memory creating experiences at scale. Um yeah, I remember wearing a Fortnite t-shirt to Adobe Summit last year before the game was it is now. I’m sure business people were wondering what a game could have to do with the future of experience business.

True Branding is Created by Your Customers. Memories are of greater brand value than a purchase. The staying power of personal experiences with a brand means you own a part of their recallable history. We remember movies because they are an experience and we have our favorite shows and even family vacations. All of these reside in our memories. We don’t currently remember when we bought nail clippers or laptops unless it was recently. As David put it, “the status quo is that organizations are racing to keep up with the rise of customer expectations because the technology evolves so rapidly—but the truly successful ones are going to tap into technology that makes us feel more human.” The integration of branding into our natural experiences and important memories is key to future success. Brand interactions will not be about making a purchase, they will be about creating memories worth recalling. This is what will create brand longevity. Memorable experiences lead to experience loyalty where we not only remember, but seek out that experience and new experiences with that brand integrated into our life story. Experience loyalty is the wall that will keep your brand in and competition out. It is the future high bar. Reach for it today. I’ll see you in the future.

Did this post make you think? What are your thoughts on the potential future of commerce? What benefits do you think brands that understand this evolution of marketing? Leave your thoughts below and share this post if you found it valuable and thanks for reading. Thanks David for the great conversation!

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Customer Touchpoints Then and Now

The Touchpoint Has Evolved. In the old days of retail, there were only a couple of touchpoints the sales cycle was very short. Most marketing was done on radio or TV and then people would come into a store and engage with the frontline employees and buy the product or service. The touchpoints were easy to manage at the store and in crafted marketing. Then entered the digital age of commerce. Websites and the internet seemed like another manageable storefront but mobile and social media changed/ruined everything. Ultra-distraction and endless media to consume changed the game for touchpoints. Shopping happens 24 hours a day anywhere, everywhere, and in many different contexts and environments making managing the touchpoints very difficult. Being where your customers come in contact with your brand is almost impossible at scale now. Technology is our only hope (besides ObiWan Kenobi).

The Loss of Control

“We’re toast man, game over! What are we supposed to do now?” The sentiment from Bill Paxton at this moment in the movie is the reality of most businesses trying to go through digital transformation. There are 3 kinds of brands out there right now, the ones with their heads in the sands pretending that it is business as usual, hoping that if they ignore the fear of a changing and hostile marketing environment that they will be OK. The second, are the ones who are building a patchwork of customer experience by using disparate technology and tactics. The last realize the magnitude of the problem and understand they must go through digital transformation but also that they can’t solve all problems at once and they are building the customer infrastructure to move forward and prepare for the new reality. Realizing your brand is out of control is the first step to getting control of your brand in the modern digital world but you don’t have to lose your mind. The fact is, brands have totally lost control of their brand narratives and the customer journey but you have to pick yourself up and rebuild. Remember your competition is facing the same problems and harsh environments weed out the competition and reward those who overcome.

Hansel and Gretel for Brands

Without Breadcrumbs You Will Be Lost. We have all heard of the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. Two kids get enticed into a witches house who intends to eat them. They leave a breadcrumb trail which eventually leads them back home once they escape. How can brands be everywhere their customer is. Organizations are lost in the sea of noise coming out of multiple devices. The only way to cut through the noise is to leave a series of breadcrumbs (touchpoints) that will lead customers back to their brands. They need a lifeline of focal points. Wherever their customers go they need to be able to find your brand trail. These touchpoints are everything and will save brands from having their customers get lost in the forest of marketing and media.

Random acts of marketing are for the birds. Throwing out random touchpoints in a net to catch customers is old school thinking and leads them nowhere. It isn’t enough to have a brand message, website, and store. Customers aren’t coming, you have to lead them. A breadcrumb trail is a series of touchpoints strategically placed and linked together to bring the customers back to your brand. The journey is your brand experience. This means real-time micro brand destinations, short-term, and long-term customer journies. The matrix of touchpoints must be expansive and yet unified. Big picture multi-variable and extensively thought out customer paths must be mapped prior to building marketing assets and campaigns. The days of campaigns being the source of new business results are shifting to campaigns being a support role for customer journeys. Customer journeys are then designed to create brand experiences. Every breadcrumb/touchpoint must in itself be an experience worthy of talking about.

Converting Touchpoints Into Talking Points

Touchpoints Need to Actually Touch Customers. Touchpoints are not a moment of interaction, they are a moment of attention and that attention must be masterfully orchestrated into compelling brand experiences that inspire talking points. Jay Baer calls these Talk Triggers. Check out his new Youtube series on Talk Triggers. He has seen through the crowded conversations about customer experience and digital commerce and boiled down a huge strategic aha moment for brands. Word of mouth continues to be a massive force in commerce and yet most businesses don’t have a word of mouth strategy. Social media is just the digital transformation of word of mouth. The technological revolution has mostly happened around digitizing communication. To miss that fact, that word of mouth is at the heart of this not technology, would be to miss the big aha.

Will Work For a Share.  The days of brands having low competition and high attention are gone. If you want someone to share your brand you have to compel them to. Customers can’t and won’t share your brand story if you don’t have one “for them” to share. Notice I said for them, this means something personal, something talk-worthy. Running a great commercial or ad campaign means nothing in today’s oversaturated always-on media world. The average person can see thousands of marketing messages a day. Even if they saw yours, it won’t likely turn into a compelling memory or talking point. You have to have a multitude of personalized, unique yet connected brand experiences placed in all places and times when a customer could come in contact with your brand. The interaction isn’t the goal, the output of that interaction is. A compelling experience with an embedded shareable talking point is the real goal. The strategy behind it is finding your talk triggers. In Jay’s Talk Triggers Keynote, he breaks down how brands can formulate their talk triggers to strategically be on brand and yet create differentiation in the market. These talk triggers can make or break you in this modern marketing environment.

From One to Many and Back

You Can’t be 2D in a 3D world. The part that many brands miss is they think in very fragmented ways. Even large established organizations are failing to be agile and cross-departmental in the way they operate. Disconnected teams exasperate the problem. The future will belong to organizations who can design for individuals, build touchpoint networks and exponential customer journeys (breadcrumb trials) while infusing talk triggers at each touchpoint to ignite their efforts to create talkable brand moments at scale. Organizations must think individually, holistically,  and make the big seem small and every experience be driven by customer choices and data.

It’s not an easy road ahead for brands, but the key is you have to understand what you are trying to do. Strategy will still determine winners and losers more than technology and more than tactics or resources. This is just a small win by converting touchpoints into talking points that will give your brand a framework for success.

What are your thoughts? Are touchpoints fine how they are? What do you think the most important things an organization should focus on to survive in the future? How will technology change the way we live and experience buying things? Leave your thoughts below and share this post if you found it interesting :]

In my latest post Using Experiential Content to Tell Brand Stories, I talk about how you can change the old informational content into experiential content that creates micro-experiences that are part of a larger brand experience.

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What is Experiential Content?

Experiential content is content that tells stories, ignites emotions, creates memories, and resonates with audiences. Content isn’t just about delivering information, you have to make people feel something, you have to make it personal so the very act of consuming your content creates memorable moments for them. One of the keys to creating memories through content is having takeaways that audiences can keep and share. Experiential content is content measured by impact.

Adding to the Internet

Turn it up! Bring the noise! Anthrax and Public Enemy might have created the anthem for today’s content marketers. The internet is full of noise and brands seem to just be adding to it. The louder it gets, the MORE content they try and make. This is entirely the wrong strategy. What cuts through today’s noisy internet is the standout content that deserves, yes I said it, deserves attention. There are many ways that content can deserve to be consumed but the gatekeeper of what is deserving attention is each individual consumer. Personalization is a key to relevance but relationships represent the high bar of being personal. Many organizations just keep churning out content only to see diminishing returns. This has many CMO’s at a loss strategically.

Jeff’s thoughts on this content marketing problem are, “80% of brand content is content created for the sake of creating content. Organizations just want to feel they are part of the conversation. This never-ending cycle of sending out content and reporting on it is an exercise in reporting progress without progress. Brands need to stop, reassess, and cut the fat by focusing on getting to relevance. Brands need to be where their customers are now, where they will be, and where it makes sense for the brand to be.”

Nested Stories

Creating a Russian doll of brand stories. Organizations are just now realizing how many more touchpoints there are in an omni-channel customer journey. The problem is touchpoint thinking is too robotic for real-time relevance. To grab attention, deliver experience, and create memories you need stories. Stories have a unique connection with memories. The concept of using a memory palace is how people learn extreme memorization skills. The idea behind it is that if you can have a visual, memory invoking hook at each point of the journey, the story and all the details can more easily be remembered.

Brand touchpoints need to be strong enough and immersive enough to create a memory anchor, but those touchpoint micro-stories need to be nestled into a larger brand story with a bigger memory anchor. The nested brand story strategy becomes the strategy for touchpoints. Making all the stories interact like episodes of a show into a bigger story is an art that Hollywood has mastered but marketers don’t yet understand. The secondary effect is that it ties into the powerful force of entertainment that drives content to both be consumed and shared.

Jeff’s advice is, “Every piece of content you create should be connected and building on other brand content. There should be no stand-alone content, there should be a brand story ecosystem. These stories should be centered on your brand and your customer so you can create true brand experiences.”

Choose Your Own Adventure

Customer paths, customer paths, everywhere! Adobe’s recent survey on content shows multi-device use continues to grow and each device in that chain multiplies the potential customer paths making it very difficult for brands to create a seamless and connected multi-screen omni-channel experience that drives brand goals. Instead of trying to be omnipresent which many brands are failing to do, a better strategy is to build customer experiences like the classic choose your own adventure books. If you choose this then turn to page x. This was revolutionary for a book when it came out with multiple possible outcomes, each driven by the reader.

Include your customer in real-time customer journey design. Personalization isn’t just about saying, “Hi, [Name]. As Jeff says, ”
We talk about personalization, but me knowing a couple stats about you, if it is being delivered on a surface level it isn’t personalization.” It includes letting customers choose their own path of content. By creating situational content triggers and even letting them drive the content revelation, you can create many experiences in one. As I noted in my piece about the future of customer experience, the gaming world has already nailed this immersive experience with storylines that change as user actions change. This creates unique, personalized, and engaging experiences where the content unfolds based on your choices. As I stated, marketing is going to be ran more like a gaming studio in the future because all the elements of immersive digital story-driven design are there and they have been practicing this for longer than marketing organizations running campaigns.

Right now the creative design is not driven by customers. Jeff says, “Patterns of your customers and how they engage with your content should be influential in your creative. Organizations have data but they aren’t using it to predict and create the next paths for their customers. It goes beyond having great content, brands need to understand how to use data to dictate their creative e decisions.”

Empathy Creates External Relevance

Relevance is only one battle. When people try and create relevance with their audience they are trying to resonate with their customers. Big and small data will enable this with AI and machine learning for deeply personalized experiences. The other side of that coin is creating immersive experiences that don’t resonate. These experiences focus on new experiences customers have never experienced before. Gaming does a great job of this. People like adventures, learning, and experiences that are new. When we watch media, especially video, our brains actually imagine ourselves as the characters through mirror neurons. This allows us to experience things through empathy created by watching others. This can be very powerful when immersive technology and content is used.

Empathy is a principle that can be employed to break through the noise by telling compelling stories that immerse customers in the journey you create for them. These can be aspirational, indulgent, or educational experiences. The future of experiential content is going to make people feel and experience brands in a way that current content simply falls flat. As Jeff Barret said, “You have to get to understanding and empathy. Data alone won’t get you there, but conversation and relationships will.” Even if relationships don’t scale yet, data represents shared memories and those constitute a brand relationship. The key is using that data and those interactions to design experiential content that creates brand memories within the brand story while still being personal to consumers.

Free your mind. I couldn’t really write a post without including at least one quote from the Matrix. So here is the deal, the goal of this post was to just transport your mind to a new way of thinking about content. I don’t have to tell you what to create, I only need to change the way you imagine content. From there you will be able to express this new way of thinking about content into your own brand of experiential story-driven content for your customers. Huge thanks to Jeff Barrett of Status Creative for collaborating on this piece with me. Make sure to follow him on social.

Did you love this post? What do you think the future of content will look like? What technologies will change the way we create and consume content? Leave your thoughts below and as always thanks for reading and sharing my posts. You are creating my exceptional experience as a writer.

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Customer experience is a baby tiger right now, so cute and cuddly, but it will become the beast of tomorrow’s marketing and business world. People think it’s a buzzword driven by technology, but the real driver of customer experience is the fundamentals of business. Mom and pops had it right, personalized service and businesses focused on customers because they are the key to revenue. Big brands have enjoyed the easy years of customer attention, sustainable revenue, and low competition. Sorry to say paradise is closed.

Nobody is Loyal to a Commodity

Brand loyalty is dying. A crowded marketplace creates commodities out of brands. Products are no longer special, and if they are, they are cannibalized by decades of training consumers to put new over old. The erosion of loyalty is fueled by the greed of the sales cycle. Organizations have made this perfect storm of brand disloyalty and customer experience design will solve the problem but not without casualties. Business has changed and unlocking the formula of future success is vital to survival. No organization large or small can continue to live as a commodity in the attention-starved minds of their customers.

Return of the Gatekeepers

My name is no, my attention is no. The markets are moving faster and businesses are accelerating out of control. Consumer expectations are the new gatekeepers and as the bar for technology-driven experiences gets raised, the barrier of entry into the attention of your customers will drift farther from your marketing efforts. In the future, you will no longer be able to get someone’s attention to show them something. You will have to get into their network of attentions which will have a shrinking pool of available openings. Immersive experiences and augmented reality will ruin the random brand encounter.

Reaching the Near Future of CX

Iceberg dead ahead! If you have ever watched Indiana Jones, you have seen the crumbling pathway requiring you to make a leap to safety. Digital transformation is that leap. The near future of CX isn’t politely asking, it is a ledge still far off for most people and not everyone who jumps will make it but you can’t stand still. If organizations don’t have a panic about digital transformation success then they are like the people eating dessert on the Titanic as lifeboats fill up. Digital transformation isn’t about cool new technology, it is about survival. It isn’t a one and done, it is a continual fight for the life of your organization.

Customer-focused Digital Transformation

Far is near. Business is progressing at a rapid pace and the only way to keep up is to stay on the cutting edge. The cutting edge is actually just today’s business drifting into the past but preparing you for tomorrow. Organizations think digital transformation is about technology but this is where customer experience comes in. Digital transformation is really about your customers. If organizations don’t get re-aligned on their customers and off the product, revenue, and shareholders, they will sink with the ship of the past. A new paradigm is needed, business has shifted. The roads of business are icy and if you keep driving how you used to and don’t correct yourself, you will crash.

The Cold Shower of the Future

It takes some getting used to. I recently started doing cold showers in the morning instead of hot. There is new research showing how it can help stimulate the deep immune system, but I started because I felt amazing afterward. The initial hit of freezing cold jolts every part of you, but when you are done you feel alive and invigorated. Businesses are getting hit with the cold shower of digital transformation right now. The good news is, it is better to take that hit now when things are not 10x as crazy so you can get your feet under you and establish a more holistic business operation. The system shock will go away and on the other side is business agility and capabilities that will sustain your organization.

What does the future of customer experience look like?

You know kung fu, show me. Of course, I have to pull a quote from The Matrix. The fact is digital transformation and CXM are simply table stakes of functional organizational ability. Once your organization has the capability to create customer experiences, then you have to apply and explore what that means and build your brand with those new capabilities. Here is what the near and far future of CX may look like.

Bringing the Outside In. Retail is not dead, but it is bleeding. Some organizations are starting to catch on to what experience design is and how it can transform their business. Canada Goose created a cold room for people to experience their extreme weather coats and gear in the store. No more pictures of people out in the cold. You can experience the value of their gear right now at point-of-purchase. This creates an immersion that you will remember “when you are shopping” This is like the old fashioned test drive of a car. Nothing sells the car like experiencing it. Imagine how many ways this can be implemented and expanded on to create shopping experiences unmatched by the likes of Amazon and eCommerce. I wrote about this in my post The Changing Face of Online and Offline Experiences.

In-Game Product Placement. The bridge to augmented reality and experience-driven eCommerce is within the gaming industry. As brands look for ways to enter the experience-driven digital commerce space, they need to look no further than gaming where teams have been developing immersive worlds for decades. Instead of starting from scratch they will start branding in a new world, not with broadcast messages but by integrated into the lives and experiences of the gamers within the games. This sandbox will be the precursor to AR and spatial commerce. When you tie into the fact that gaming studios are on the cutting edge and have experience designing immersive experiences, you will see them being the early-adopting partners of brands who want to create immersive experiences.

Exclusive Experiences. The future will belong to the VIC (Very Important Customers) Exclusive content, hidden content, and invite-only/paid loyalty programs will allow brands to create high-end personalized customer experiences with a select group of their best customer/advocates. The byproduct of this will be focus groups 2.0. Feedback loops with the VIC’s will act as both influencer outreach and agile brand development. All of this can and will be gamified and tiered to offer both rewards and get customer feedback at varying levels.

Projection Mapping. Interactive digital and physical displays and experiences are going to create deep and memorable brand experiences in the physical world that translate through social and user-generated content into the digital world. This experience-led loop will create tremendous opportunities for brands and reinvigorate the retail side of businesses.

Co-op Attention and Experiences. In the future of immersive experiences and micro-immersions, brands will need to team up to both generate attention and to piggyback in to create experiences. Like the memory castle technique for remembering and recalling multiple items, collaborative experience design will be a must for everyone to get a share of attention from customers of the future. Brands becoming media companies, and complex multi-brand experience design will rule the day.

Keepsake Brand Management. Experiences matter because they create memories. As immersive personalization drives the creative with the ultimate goal of brand loyalty, keepsakes and memory triggers will become both physical and digital. When you go to a concert you get a T-shirt to remember your experience. This piece of post-experience memory trigger will become a huge part of attention retention. Look for organizations to plan personalized keepsakes and products delivered in real-time to customers to reinforce the experience of buying the product.

AI-driven Image Recognition. The future of commerce will be stores will not be the only place we buy and neither will websites. The proliferation of augmented reality and spatial computing will enable the capability of AI-driven image recognition and shopping integration so that you can buy anything you see. This will loop back into things you see digitally in the future digitally enhanced world of AR. This means everything you see you can learn about and buy and that includes the real-life digital product integration that will be driven by AI to enhance the world you see through mixed reality.

OK, I had more, but I can’t spill all the beans in one post. The fact is the future is not the present and organizations have to get centered in customer experience to be able to see the horizon and beyond and position their organizations for survival and competitive advantage. This takes vision, leadership, technology, and people with the aptitude and agility to drive into the technology-driven future we are all racing to.

Did you like this post? I would love to hear your thoughts and predictions on the future and how technology and customers will disrupt our current models. What was an eye-opener? What do you think will play the biggest role? Leave your thoughts below and share this post if you found it valuable. Thanks again

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Spatial computing is the integration of technology that mixes reality with digital. This can include everything from 3D mapping of real-world objects, AI-driven image recognition powered by machine learning, and of course the hardware that allows us to experience this enhanced spatial reality.

I think spatial computing is going to be one of the biggest evolutions of technology since the internet and it is right around the corner. Now I could talk about the near future and how it is going to be used in various industries and business applications but instead let’s talk about the far future to get a possible glimpse of how this technology may impact society and our world after is goes beyond mainstream adoption. This is the deeper potential future reality of spatial computing and some of the unintended consequences we may need to watch for when we get beyond core benefits

Spatial computing has some of the greatest tangible benefit potential of most of the technology we have created so far. For business, personal, and global benefit, spatial computing will not only change our society, it will recreate it. With that ubiquitous adoption will come issues with our new digital reality. To position yourself and your organization for success you first have to have a vivid vision for how this technology could change our world. I recently had a great discussion with a friend and fellow spatial computer futurist Cathy Hackl and the possible alternate realities of a spatial computing world.

Designer Society

Do you think that is air you are breathing? The world we live in is amazing and we have built it with our minds and hands. The next world we live in will be an enhanced world that we build digitally and then integrate with the real world. The impact on society will be larger than that of the internet. I call it the internet unboxed. In the same way, wireless technology changed everything and accelerated society, spatial computing will create a designed reality we will live in every day.

From Creation to Creator. What might the world look like if we could re-create it from our own imaginations? In the future, we will no longer be bound by reality. The battle cry of innovators and changemakers up to now has been you can change the world. Now we are entering a time when our ability to change both our world and the world around us will be substantially more accessible than building bridges and billion-dollar companies. Reality will soon be democratized.

Hardware gets us there, but software is everything. As Cathy explains, ”
The hardware takes in reality, (where your smartphone camera is pointed, or VR headset is oriented) the software uses this info to reimagine the reality and put it back to the user via the hardware.” This is the stitching of reality and digital in spatial computing. The future will be so integrated with digital, a creative revolution will happen. The demand for creative content and software will be off the charts as augmented reality will seep into every area of life. This will start as a transition from screens which I call the great reality migration. Once we start creating a new digitally enhanced world, we will have a whole real world to fill up with digital experiences and that means an unthinkable amount of creative needed to just match what we experience in everyday reality.

Competitive Reality

“I know the steak is not real, but I want it anyway.” – The Matrix. One of the unintended consequences of a digitally enhanced world is the competition for reality will go to the designed reality. Life is full of imperfections, but when you design your reality you can eliminate all of those things. Like when children have to get off the exciting video game and do the dishes, regular un-enhanced life will seem like quite a letdown. This will lead to addictive behaviors as we transition to a fully enhanced augmented life.

Welcome to the real… In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus shows Neo the real world which is gloomy and dystopian. I can imagine a world where companies allow you to pay to affect how people see you. Imagine digital makeup subscriptions where you pay to override how others see you. This doesn’t require resources, it requires access similar to how Comcast forces you to watch commercials even on a DVR because they can charge the advertisers more to override your fast forward capabilities. This new enhanced world will become a marketplace for what you see and experience.

Reflective Personalization

The snake eats its own tail. As we go beyond the personalization revolution driven by big and small data and predictive analytics we will reach a point where you are served up a reality so catered to your desires and preferences that you will literally live in your own world. As Cathy points out, “Spatial computing will fundamentally change the human-computer relationship. Rather than being tied down to screens and devices computing will be all around us, painting our reality with data.” In the beginning, this will bring an ultra-personalized set of experiences that will feel amazing, but over the long horizon this can, of course, have some major psychological downsides. When we get what we want and nothing is restrained from us, people will become unable to cope with anything outside of this reflective personalization. It will become its own addiction. Consider it a superego that is driven by the ultimate self-indulgence and selfishness. Again, this is the far future beyond the baby tiger that seems so cute and harmless.

AI-driven Creative

Will AI take over the world? Maybe, but first it will take over creative. The future will need massive creative outputs that people will not likely be able to facilitate. A new taste for AI-driven creative will rise up and when AI meets the threshold with machine learning then competition for creative will reach a pinnacle. AI will constantly be able to crowdsource and create making it hard for people to compete. The good news is creativity is organic, but the bad news is the volume and velocity of creation is limited with people.

Are you going to eat that? Artificial intelligence is going to drink your milkshake and this will be a massive shift and new frontier for technology and society. This will be the moment when people realize we can’t turn back. This is the moment when people will realize technology may not be our servant.

Digital Delusions

I don’t just play a doctor on TV… Our society is in large part made up of fake things, the imaginations of someone. Video games, TV shows, even politics and marketing. Much of it is made up. So what happens when even more of our world is not actually real? People will start to blur the lines between the choices they make in digital and digitally enhanced environments and the real world. This means as they become enhanced they will lose touch with reality to embrace the new reality. At what point will we become a collection of the choices we make even when those choices may be digital ones that appear to have no consequences?

Thought Police

When your reality is created in real-time to match your thoughts and desires what consequences might happen? Say you walk into work and imagine in your mind that the boss you don’t like comes up and you can either imagine they say something else so you can live in your digital bubble or lets imagine in you punch your boss in the face. Nothing happened in reality but it did in your reality because you thought it and you experienced it with spatial computing. Will there be new crimes of the mind? All of that data will be captured and even your thoughts and desires will be able to be scrutinized. Like in the movie Minority Report, a preemptive action could be taken by way of a predictive analytic algorithm or because you actually committed the crime in your mind with augmented reality.

It’s all going to be OK

Let’s not get all doom and gloom about the future just yet. Yes, technology that changes the way people live can and will have major effects on our lives but we also get to shape those outcomes and balance the equation. Understanding the darker outer edges of change and technology can help us understand the consequences of these changes. There are many positive benefits of technology, but we must remember, many things that could be very bad started with some early value. We are going into a golden age of technology that will add tremendous value to the world, but we must always remember the potential unwanted side effects and build in safeguards to protect ourselves from the new future.

We are talking about the far potential future of this technology but for the near future, there are tons of benefits. As Cathy says, ” Don’t wait! Get involved with spatial computing now. The opportunities for employee training, customer experiences, and product marketing are low hanging fruit at this point.” Society changing technology should be analyzed and examined for it’s major and minor impacts on our world moving forward. Spatial computing is a small conversation now, but you can bet it will be a game-changer in the future. Special thanks to Cathy Hackl for her input into this powerfully important conversation and for her friendship! Give her a follow if you aren’t already connected with her to stay up to date on the latest in spatial computing, AR, VR, and technology.

What are your thoughts? Did I make you think about the future differently? What changes do you see as you think about the evolution of technology and society? Share your thoughts below and share this post if you found it interesting. Who knows, maybe in 10-20 years we will see if any of this came true.

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An Overwhelming Shift

Public relations as defined by over 1400+ professionals, scholars, and researchers is a “strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.“

PR was sideswiped by a shift in communication driven by advances in technology. The underlying environment that the PR industry grew up on has changed. This old model has changed from having only a few choices for information delivery in an uncrowded environment where companies had distinct brand positions, trust, and an audience with a positive desire for brand broadcast messaging. Compare that to now where “publics” are no longer large general demographic groups but splintered individualistic over-distracted, untrusting, and often unloyal consumers who are also vocally amplifying their opinions of every brand move, message, and experience. Yeah, the fear of a handful of journalistic critics in media positions has turned into millions of brand critics amplifying your brand experience reality 24 hours a day and creating user-generated brand content that you have no control over.

Power to the People

Your brand now has a mind of its own. Control of brand perception is no longer an in-house asset to be managed for company benefit. The people have spoken and your brand now has its own voice that your messaging is only a sliver of. In some ways, this brand reality is great for consumers, but for many organizations, it is a level of transparency that should make your company rethink your whole business from design through the product experience lifespan. As Sarah Evans says:

Your customer is finally important. Every business will tell you that their customers are important but in reality, a large percentage of choices made in an organization are not made with the customer in mind. The customer ultimately, like employees, are functionally an input of resources. A source of revenue, and that revenue hinges on getting them to buy your product or service. Whether that product serves them, generates value, or meets expectations is a matter of minimums and often letdowns. Marketing has been mastered to sell mediocre products with an arms-length broadcast approach to customer interaction through marketing and PR. As my friend Jessika Phillips says, “Brand are using a blowhorn instead of actually creating relationships.”

Talking at Groups

Nothing builds relationships like a press release. The days of brand headquarters releasing notices to the masses are numbered. When you aren’t talking to a person, they just don’t listen. Millions are being poured into public notices that nobody reads. As Sarah told me, “We have to go beyond vanity metrics and look more in-depth at what truly resonates and makes people want to come back to a brand.” Organizations doing PR aren’t just using old models, they are measuring the wrong things to define success. Talking to a general group of supposed customer avatar creates communications that are too easy to ignore and for it to even get enough customer attention to matter it would have to be extremely compelling. The idea of a billboard attracting so much attention from untargeted passing people as a hope of making a real brand impression only worked in a time gone past where there was nothing else interesting to look at. When you fold in the basic human desire to be unique and important which works in opposition to talking to general groups you can see the problem with trying to do old school PR in a changed world.

The Big Scary World

The complexity of society and business can be crippling. Businesses from the top to the bottom are just waking up to the enormity of the customer journey. This change is beyond omni-channel thinking, or customer touchpoints. There are more conversations and communications happening in 1 second than brands could even comprehend. Holistic brand experience design, business agility, and attribution are the next evolution of business and all things that touch it like PR. We can’t focus on everything all at once considering we are really just finding out how unsophisticated our understanding is in this new digital world we live in. As Sarah told me when talking about all the complex issues facing modern PR, “Reframe challenges as opportunities.” So yes, start with the fundamentals and an eyes wide open approach to what is going on and what is needed to meet the challenges of today’s business environment from all directions.

Dancing with Two Partners

It’s not easy to dance with two partners. Customers and technology both demand attention, are quick to change opinions, and are ready to dance with someone else in a moment if they feel neglected, intrigued, or even distracted. Organizations now need to rethink their whole operations with the customer in mind. Experiences are no longer going to be allowed to happen randomly as an afterthought in the road to manipulated/marketing-driven purchases. Technology will solve all your business problems, it can aid you but not save you. Technology is a double-edged sword in the modern business world. Aside from the big rewards, it could also disrupt your workflow and lead to a crash and burn expense, or it could anchor you to old thinking and processes that sink the ship. It is a high risk/reward situation that is both demanding and hard to navigate. New deployments can be wrecked with people and integration bottlenecks in a competitive business environment with little time to course-correct. Hold on tight and try and keep up with your customers and technology because they are going to test every organizational limit and you have to do it without skipping a beat.

Welcome to the Real

Do you think that is PR you are doing? Once a PR professional and organization is unplugged from the Matrix of old thinking to see the real world they are operating in, it may be disorienting and the new reality is often not the good news they hoped for. The good news is there is hope. Because the barrier of awareness, let alone execution, is so high it is a worthy journey and early adopters will be highly rewarded with market position reserved for the few who had the vision to imagine things are harder and more complex than anyone ever thought. Like Neo from the movie The Matrix, once you accept the true reality you can go back into the false reality everyone else is operating in and do the impossible. Organizations that have not opened their eyes and accepted the new world as it is are stuck playing by a false set of rules and limiting beliefs that you are no longer bound to. PR has changed…All business has changed. Learn the new rules and rethink everything. This mindset both for PR professionals and organizations will let you see the massive opportunities that are waiting for you in modern PR.

Did this post make you think? What are your thoughts about the changes to business and PR? Are businesses living in a false reality and what are the coming consequences as we push ahead at faster rates? Leave your comments and thoughts below and a big thanks to Sarah Evans for the great conversation around this important topic.

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From Convenience to Experience

Life is getting easier, business is getting harder. Retail sales are projected to increase by 3.3% in 2019 overall, but eCommerce is expected to grow 15% compared to only 2% for brick and mortar sales (eMarketer). Retailmageddon is still happening, but it doesn’t have to. What is happening now isn’t the future of retail, it is part of the evolution of retail, there is a big difference. Let’s take a moment and step back to see forward. Imagine the path that has brought us here. History can be useful and it tells a tale that gives us a glimpse of where we are likely going next. Let’s talk shopping and retail. Even from the days of early settlers in America, a general store brought you the basics you needed, and also some things from distant places that you couldn’t normally access. Zoom forward to stores like Sears and Walmart, one-stop shopping so you don’t have to drive all over to get what you need and want. Convenience has been the driving force for innovation in offline shopping for some time.

So what do consumers want more, convenience or experiences? Well, the answer is, it depends. Some personality types like to shop, while other people like to buy things. This idea is further complicated by the factors of digital addiction. People who like to shop online can find joy in ordering, but it isn’t quite the same as going to the mall. The fact is people want both convenience and experience. There are still those who lean to one side or the other but the expectations are growing for organizations to have both. Retail is not dead, Business leaders have to understand the driving motivations and then rethink their models. Digital is edging out retail for now, but the status-quo of physical shopping and the technology laggards are keeping a lifeline for retail, but to lead, both have some lessons to learn. Let’s look at retail.

Amazon Isn’t Killing Retail, Old Thinking Is

A wrench makes a poor hammer. If you have ever had to use the back of a wrench for a hammer, it kinda works but not very well. The same holds true for the way retail is trying to survive using antiquated models of convenience against a superior service like Amazon while also failing to seize opportunities that Amazon can’t compete with when it comes to customer experience. You know what I can’t get from Amazon, a hot cocoa with my son, quality time with friends, sights, sounds, smells, trying on clothes, finding new things I wasn’t even looking for, and memories that are worth remembering. The problem is the days of buying inventory, putting out signage and waiting for foot traffic are over. Stores have sweaters on a shelf… so what. I can get that sweater for cheaper online. Stores need to get out of the idea of inventory, a cashier, and some point of purchase displays. That is a model that will be beat by Amazon all day long.

Where is Retail missing the point? Retail thinks it needs to modernize and become more digital and that is how it will survive, but even if parts of this are true it is not a solution. You won’t beat Amazon by creating an app or selling your inventory online. Technology is most commonly integrated to increase convenience, like self-checkout, sale notifications, or app purchases for in-store pickup. Though there are benefits to this, getting current on technology-driven convenience won’t have you fending off Amazon. Retailers need to find ways to use technology and traditional methods to create immersive experience both in-store, pre-store, and post-store across multiple channels and devices. This is where they can really win their customers back from Amazon and differentiate themselves from their competition.

Retail needs to sell everything but the sweater. In 10 minutes a store could write down all the things people can’t get from Amazon or a purchase on their phone. Look, not everyone wants to just buy the object, where is the romance in that? A common trend that lines up with the millennial mindset is they want experiences, not things. As Chelsea Krost, one of the top experts in marketing to Millennials told me, “Millennials are drawn to and value brand experiences, for brick and mortar stores who have not already revamped their customer experience to a more intimate/exclusive in-store experience to enhance the customer journey… the time is now!”

Millennials also want to be social, feel they are part of something bigger, and be included not sold to. All of these factors point to a major failure in the current models used by the established retail organizations. They are stuck selling like it’s 1999. While they blame Amazon for their decline they fail to see it’s not about Amazon, it’s about them and their customer. They were able to get away with putting sweaters on shelves when that was the most convenient way to buy a sweater. They need to realize they are no longer in the convenience business and shift gears to the experience business model. This will also provide a much-needed alternative and contrast to the commoditized digital convenience model.

The Evolution of Experience

Having Cake and Eating It Too. There is a simple human fact that the retail industry could learn from, on people’s death bed they aren’t thinking about their possessions, they are remembering the experiences and the people in their life. Yes, you have cake to sell, but remember, what your customers will really cherish are the memories of eating it. Experience is sadly still just a crumb on the table of retail when it comes to focus, but that leaves a lot of room for the brands willing to make a crumb cake (I feel I am subconsciously eating carbs here). As technology-enabled a higher level of convenience retailers enamored with their new savings, efficiencies, and profits lost focus of their customers, abandoned the idea of customer experience, but ultimately got pummeled by the big bad Amazon who out optimized them with convenience in the digital model. All hope is not lost if brands realize the real opportunity is in customer experience, not technology and efficiency. Hey retail, I’m your customer, remember me?

The rebirth of retail is waiting. Woe is me is what most retailers are thinking when they feel the weight of having Amazon as a competitor. Retail is running on fumes. The thing is, they could be dominating and designing customer experiences that Amazon can’t compete with. This is the power of vision. If you lack it, or if an industry lacks it, they will fall. Blockbuster tried to stay their course and they were disrupted by efficiency. They could have countered with immersive experiences. Toys R Us failed to double down on in-store experiences as well. Going to an entire store full of toys is part of the experience that is missing for families with the absence of Toys R Us. Retail can thrive in a digital world. When everyone is pushed in one direction like a digital experience, it creates a natural demand for contrast and variety. Why do we wrap gifts? Why not just hand the gift to someone, it’s not needed and not convenient to unwrap a gift. Come to find out people actually want a bow on top. They want a real person to greet them and know their name, they crave that old mom and pops authentic personalized experience that comes from appreciating every customer.

The Future of Online and Offline Experiences

Adapt or Die. Will retail wake up, wipe away the tears and forge ahead into the blue oceans of customer experience design or will we all be sitting in chairs with VR headsets drinking smoothies and ordering off Amazon? I am optimistic that once we have had our fill of hype-convenience we will seek experiences, memories, and reality. We shall see if the stores of the future will rise to the challenge to give us what we want and solidify their important place in the commerce ecosystem. Even if the extremes of convenience and experience have their day as new technology emerges, both Chelsea and I agree that the combination of digital and physical is what the future will look like. Instead of being at odds with each other, they will work together not just for convenience, but for experience as well. As Chelsea said, “The line between offline and online is becoming more fluid. With the increase in data collection from the customer journey, offline and online will only become more seamless.”

If you liked this post, leave your thoughts below. Did it make you think? What do you think the future will look like and who will win the battle of convenience vs experience? Things are unfulfilling so I am going with experience but the leadership has to have the vision to push into it. One of the things I love about working with Adobe is they are all in on experience business and for me, that is the future. Thanks to Chelsea Krost for including her insight in this post and for being a guest on #Adobechat to dig into this topic :]

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